Artists Resist Colonialism With African Comic-book Heroes

October 18, 1988|By JAMES BROOKE, New York Times News Service

LAGOS, Nigeria -- Fresh out of an African university, young Abbie Momo bursts into tears upon learning that her parents paid the school fees with a bride price secretly negotiated with ``the notorious Chief Eza.``

In Havila, 7-year-old Shilla disappears in the woods. Her distraught parents are convinced that she has been kidnapped for ritual murder.

Faced with dramas like these, Nigerian comic-book writers are learning to shout in chorus: It sounds like a job for Captain Africa.

With a map of Africa emblazoned on his green body suit and a solar-powered cape for ``super speed`` flight, Captain Africa has a noble mission: To fight ``all evil and dark forces that threaten Africa and the whole world.``

Captain Africa`s arrival on Nigeria`s publishing scene in 1987 is part of a trend across Africa to decolonize comics.

For years, Africans complained that the serialized stories of Tarzan and the Phantom revolved largely around the exploits of whites in Africa, with black Africans relegated to supporting roles.

Now Tarzan seems to be on the wane, although the Phantom remains popular, and a new generation of African illustrators are starting to draw and distribute their own comic books. In a continent where literacy levels are low, the illustrated African stories are increasingly popular.

Captain Africa is published by African Comics Ltd., and its president, Mbadiwe Emelumba, said in an interview here: ``We have our own culture, our own heritage. It`s important to defend against cultural colonialism.``

Created by committee, Captain Africa battles superstition and ignorance in dramatic situations familiar to modern African readers.

``Take `The Bride Price,``` Emelumba said, speaking of Abbie Momo`s story. ``It happens all the time in Africa. Parents sell their daughters off to any rich man who comes along.``

The series on Captain Africa battling a gang of ritual child murderers presented readers with a drama that could have been lifted from the tabloid newspapers of any African country.

Created as a role model for urban Africans, Captain Africa lives in an airbrushed Africa, a continent of comfortable villas, clean hospitals and vacations on imaginary tropical islands.

``Gone are the days of Africans wearing raffia skirts,`` said Andy Akman, the Ghanaian artist who draws the imaginary superhero. ``We are living in modern houses. He must be a Superman, not a Tarzan.``

Unlike Superman, who is a newspaper reporter in everyday life, Captain Africa is a successful businessman.

``Africans are suspicious of people who are not comfortable,`` Akman explained. ``In Africa, most of our problems have come from people who become leaders and then see their opportunity to make it financially.``

Down the coast in French-speaking Gabon, Richard Amvane draws a comic series that has a less didactic role. Writing under the pen name Lourent Levigot, he explores the dilemmas of urbanized Africans.

``Village and city -- that`s my theme,`` said Amvane, who grew up in a thatched-roof hut, one of six children of a cocoa farmer. The first in his family to learn to read and write French, Amvane joined a stream of Gabonese flooding to Libreville, the capital, in recent years.

``We think of the village all the time, but we only go back once a year,`` he said in an interview as a rooster could be heard crowing through an open window of his cinder-block house. ``We are torn. When we go back we find we are no longer used to the food. We`re used to the kind of food you buy in stores.``

In his comics, serialized in Libreville`s daily newspaper L`Union, the urbanized African reader finds familiar characters: Tita Abessolo, an old peasant who comes to the city for the first time and is hoodwinked by city slickers; Ayo, the young village woman who comes to the city full of hope but becomes a rich man`s mistress.

``We are in a city in mutation,`` the 32-year-old artist said. ``A person who doesn`t know how to live in the city, who has never seen a refrigerator, can be humorous.`` Amvane also draws on African superstitions. In one series, Mamy Wata, a beautiful river mermaid, lures a scheming African and his unscrupulous European partner to their deaths by drowning.

``Africans believe in Mamy Wata,`` he said, pointing to his sketches of the voluptuous mermaid. ``They believe there are spirits in the river.``

Separated by language and 1,000 miles of coastline, both artists say their independent attempts to create African comics have struck a chord among readers. Both report receiving hundreds of letters monthly.

``The man in the street likes to read African stories with pictures,`` Amvane said as he stood by a new South Korean television he had bought with his comic-book earnings.